LEXINGTON, Ky. -- Notre Dame and Stanford will play Sunday to decide once and for all which is the era's preeminent program in women's basketball.
Or at least, that's how the story goes in a parallel universe. One in which Geno Auriemma perhaps followed a passion for food and wine to rise to the pinnacle of the restaurant business and scratched a suppressed itch for basketball by building a dynasty in the local CYO league.
In our version of reality, the stakes when top-seeded Notre Dame and second-seeded Stanford meet in Sunday's regional final (ESPN/WatchESPN, noon ET) are familiar to both. To the winner gets a trip to the Final Four, a place the Fighting Irish and Cardinal have been more often in the past decade than any program other than Connecticut. And with the berth comes a likely uphill climb to displace the four-time defending national champion from atop the sport.
Notre Dame and Stanford met in the NCAA tournament two years ago in Oklahoma City, a game the Fighting Irish won en route to the national championship game. They met in the tournament a year ago here in Rupp Arena, a game won by the Cardinal en route to yet another regional final. Now they meet again.
"I think the NCAA committee just really likes this matchup," Stanford's Erica McCall said. "They want to see it time and time again. So it means it must be pretty iconic."
That sounded at least a little tongue in cheek, but she's right.
The game in Rupp Arena will have nothing to do with the Huskies, of course, hundreds of miles away in Bridgeport, Connecticut. It will come down to whether Stanford can trouble Lindsay Allen the same way it slowed Texas' Brooke McCarty with a combined defensive effort from Bri Roberson and Marta Sniezek; whether Notre Dame defenders successfully chase Stanford sharpshooter Karlie Samuelson through a dizzying series of screens -- a chase that proved ultimately futile when she shot the lights out a year ago; whether Stanford makes the defensive adjustments that Ohio State did not to Notre Dame's twin high posts of Erin Boley and Kathryn Westbeld when the team was missing Brianna Turner due to injury.
Yet two former national champions always play to free themselves from Connecticut's shadow. In the alternate universe, they, perhaps along with Baylor, would be this era's gold standards.
Notre Dame is a game away from its sixth Final Four in the past seven seasons. Stanford is in its 11th regional final in the past 14 years and seeking its seventh Final Four in that span. The coaches, Muffet McGraw and Tara VanDerveer, have nearly 1,900 wins between them.
"I think you see the mirror image in the coaches," Allen said. "They're really smart coaches. They prepare really well. Whether they have a day or a few hours, they're going to be really prepared. They're going to have a plan for us. And then in the players each coach recruits, they're incredibly smart, they're talented, they're skilled. They play with swagger."
Seven seasons might not seem like a lot of time, but it's an epoch in college sports. Notre Dame sophomore Arike Ogunbowale and freshmen Boley and Jackie Young, three of the stars of the record-breaking offensive production against Ohio State in the Sweet 16, weren't even in high school when Skylar Diggins and the Fighting Irish beat Tennessee in 2011 to reach the program's first Final Four since winning its only national championship a decade earlier.
It was just 24 months ago that Notre Dame played for a national championship, but with Turner injured, Allen and Westbeld are the only players Friday who had played any minutes in a Final Four. And still, Notre Dame looked as it has so consistently over nearly a decade. Without its injured star, it played as well together as it has all season. That doesn't happen without institutional memory.
Almost alone in the sport, Notre Dame built a culture comparable to Connecticut. For all the talk of invincibility, the Fighting Irish won seven of eight games against the Huskies in the span of three seasons. They were the last team to beat the Huskies in the postseason, in the 2012 Final Four.
"I think [the 2001 national championship] helped me a little bit, just knowing that we were capable of getting there," McGraw said. "But I really think Skylar [Diggins] did so much to change the culture of our program when she came in. She just set a new tone and changed things, really brought the level up in terms of practicing. We were able to carry it on after she left. That was probably her biggest legacy for us."
An Ohio native from a family of lifelong Ohio State fans, Westbeld vividly remembered getting her first recruiting letter in seventh grade from, of all programs, archenemy Michigan. By the time she ranked as one of the nation's top 25 high school recruits, she winnowed the choices to Ohio State and Notre Dame. The Buckeyes recruited her early and often, a flattering thing for a fan and a local kid. The Fighting Irish entered the picture later. But they brought something else.
"I just remember asking myself why wouldn't I go to Notre Dame?" Westbeld said. "I stumped myself. I couldn't answer the question. So that was it, that was all I needed to know. ... It's a 40-year decision, rather than the four. I think that's what really got me here."
People at Stanford can at times be understandably tetchy about the idea that the Pac-12 has somehow emerged from the depths of nowhere the past few seasons, as if the Cardinal ruled over a quasi-mid-major outfit for the preceding few decades. More exposure on television in the days before they had their own network, more favorable seeding in the NCAA tournament and even more open mindedness, they suggest, and the league might have had the reputation it deserved. That was the case VanDerveer put forth when asked about the league Saturday.
Yet two parallel things can be true at the same time. The Pac-12 may have suffered too long from underexposure. It is also much better than it was because of Stanford's example.
What needs to happen in the rest of the country, more programs meeting the standard set by Connecticut, happened on a slightly smaller scale on the West Coast in the past decade.
What Oregon State and Washington did a season ago and what Oregon did Saturday in stunning No. 3 Maryland a week after the Ducks stunned No. 2 Duke is partly due to the Cardinal.
"I think the programs in our conference made a huge commitment to elevating their programs as well, to kind of join the race," longtime Stanford associate coach Amy Tucker said. "Obviously Stanford has put up 30 years at the top. But other programs have made a huge commitment, in terms of hiring excellent coaches. And keeping West Coast talent home -- usually those kids would go east. That has been the biggest thing."
Both Stanford and Notre Dame are national champions, one a quarter of a century ago and the other well more than a decade ago. But arguably each program's most impressive work has not been rewarded with a title. As Tennessee slowly receded from the top of the food chain over the past decade, the Cardinal and Fighting Irish maintained a standard season after season that few could match. And a standard that only one could exceed.